I am planning a NYC mirror of the Cambridge Open set on July 1st. If no other spaces are available, I plan on using classrooms in Hamilton Hall on Columbia University's campus, because I live 3 minutes away.

Because I am unable to reserve rooms in Hamilton Hall over the summer, the field for this tournament will be capped at six teams, so that the tournament can be run in a very small number of rooms. The activity in Hamilton Hall on Saturdays in the summer is low enough for there to easily be 3 available rooms at any one time, but it cannot be 100% guaranteed that all three of those rooms will be unoccupied for 8 hours continuously - there's a small chance that one of those rooms might have to move once during the day, and the probability grows with the field size.

The entry fee for this tournament will be equal to the mirror fee, plus $30 to pay for staff lunch/transport/etc. You will receive a $10 discount for bringing a buzzer.

To form teams, please sign up in this spreadsheet, and post in this thread with your team name, number of buzzers you are bringing, and number of staffers you are bringing once a team has been finalized.

The buzzer penalty strikes me as weirdly onerous. There should be more than enough buzzers between NYU's and Columbia's, and penalizing free agents/people no longer in school for not having buzzers is a tad unfair.

Edward Lansdale wrote:The buzzer penalty strikes me as weirdly onerous. There should be more than enough buzzers between NYU's and Columbia's, and penalizing free agents/people no longer in school for not having buzzers is a tad unfair.

It's not uncommon practice to charge open teams higher fees than school teams already, so if this has this effect then I think it's fine. Also, the more buzzers the better, in case someone brings that awful system that makes a sound like a dying bird.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:It's not uncommon practice to charge open teams higher fees than school teams already, so if this has this effect then I think it's fine. Also, the more buzzers the better, in case someone brings that awful system that makes a sound like a dying bird.

The only good reason for charging open teams a higher fee than school teams is to prevent the former from crowding out the latter at a tournament during the school year. I don't think that rationale applies to summer tournaments, where people prefer to play on teams that are not restricted to students from the same school.

If the objective is to discourage open teams by charging them a higher fee, just charge a higher base fee. Buzzer penalties may not necessarily discourage open teams since it is perfectly possible for such teams to procure buzzers by borrowing or buying them.

It's pretty clear the rationale in this case is to avoid a shortage of buzzers. I'm not an economist, but I don't think you can solve a shortage of a good by taxing people who don't have it.

If there's demand, would people potentially be okay with allowing a five-person team or two? Don't think it's wise to have too many teams - six is ideal for a double round robin + finals setup, and minimizes the number of rooms we need (3) but wouldn't want to shut out people who want to play. As long as we're not forming stupid superteams like Eric/Jerry/me or something this way.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:If there's demand, would people potentially be okay with allowing a five-person team or two? Don't think it's wise to have too many teams - six is ideal for a double round robin + finals setup, and minimizes the number of rooms we need (3) but wouldn't want to shut out people who want to play. As long as we're not forming stupid superteams like Eric/Jerry/me or something this way.

As someone who hasn't found a team yet, I would be very happy if we could open up space for a five person team or two. Considering the field, I don't think that it would make the tournament any less competitive, depending on what the theoretical five person teams are.

wcheng wrote:As someone who hasn't found a team yet, I would be very happy if we could open up space for a five person team or two. Considering the field, I don't think that it would make the tournament any less competitive, depending on what the theoretical five person teams are.

Given that there's a (hypothetical) full UMD team available and at least three more people still on the waitlist (presumably to increase) I honestly at this point would propose taking the gamble and expanding to 8 teams AND allowing a five-person team or two. I feel like the number of classes will be relatively limited; furthermore, if rooms can't be reserved, then we would presumably be given priority by most reasonable people who are just looking for a room for personal purposes, if they know we're running something. We could start early (maybe at 8am) to make sure there's time to get through at least ten rounds tournament (7 prelims/3 playoffs) in case of a fiasco.

I don't know if there are any major potential issues with campus security, but even as a non-student I've never had issues getting into Hamilton or Kent during the summer when I've been to Columbia practices, not even after the sun sets.

I just put myself down as a staffer on the spreadsheet and it looks to me as if I'm the only one staffing so far. I don't know if there are other people who have otherwise signaled intent to staff outside, but I think that expanding to field to 8 teams should be put off until we have at least 4 committed staffers.

I just put myself down as a staffer on the spreadsheet and it looks to me as if I'm the only one staffing so far. I don't know if there are other people who have otherwise signaled intent to staff outside, but I think that expanding to field to 8 teams should be put off until we have at least 4 committed staffers.

Ophir mentioned that we could expand to seven teams and have the bye team staff - less than ideal (especially since one of the teams has 2 players right now) but would let the UMD team play. The big issue would be that we'd probably have to make the three bottom bracket teams staff two rounds, and they'd each only get 8 games (assuming 7 prelims -> 4/3 split). So it would kind of suck.

That said, there is money set aside to compensate staffers - so that could be put to use.

Check-In: 8 to 8:45 AM.Start: All games will start by 9 AM sharp. This is to make sure that, if we have enough rooms, we don't waste time.Prelims: 9AM to approximately 1:30-2 - Prelims (7 game round robin)Lunch break until 2:30Playoffs: - Either three or six rounds, depending on what people want and whether we get forced to move. I'm personally in favor of more rounds, but whatever works - will play it by ear.

I've tentatively dumped all the free agents on one team, pending any additional signups.

1) Thanks to everyone who played, and congrats to Jael! I think this went about as well as one could hope for a slapdash event.2) I suck at this game.3) Perhaps British people have different tastes than myself, but this was the worst "all-subject" event I have ever played. This is not due the unadulterated British content (which was expected, and I enjoyed Oxford Open). I would not recommend this tournament for an American audience, and would strongly encourage choosing NASAT or Oxford Open over it, given a choice.

I would say I preferred CamO, by a little, to the Oxford (American) Tournament, but that perception might be colored by a couple of questions I particularly enjoyed. From the perspective of someone who's not intimately in tune with the canon/topics and might be less sensitive to deviations, CamO felt similar to the OAT in terms of difficulty. The British-ness of the content is to be expected, and I thought this set was only slightly more British, despite being un-Americanized, than the OAT. A few egregious examples come to mind but they didn't felt overwhelming to me personally. I can only really comment on a limited part of the Qs, but I would say music had some notable difficulty swings. Overall this tournament felt quite "normal" to me and I don't view it as a bad tournament, nor a standout one. It could be I'm looking for different things from quiz bowl than others, but CamO was an overall enjoyable experience for me.

Some of the bonus lead-ins had some lengthy attempts at humor, at least one of which I recall is predicated on what I believe was a Cambridge in-joke of some sort, which might have fell a bit flat.

Thanks for playing our set, and hope that at least some of it was enjoyable - sorry to hear that it didn't quite meet with the universal acclaim we'd hoped for. I've requested a private discussion forum, but in the meantime I'd be very grateful for any comments either in general or on the science to be sent to the e-mail address on my profile.